The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  Old Casey took his sweet time, but we were glad to wait

  And showered him with garbage as the team came out the gate.

  So happy were the Dustburg fans that grand glorious day,

  It took a dozen cops to help poor Casey get away,

  But we grabbed hold of the bumpers and we rocked him to and fro

  And he cursed us from inside the bus, and gosh, we loved it so!

  Oh, sometimes in America the sun is shining bright,

  Life is joyful sometimes, and all the world seems right,

  But there is no joy in Dustburg, no joy so pure and sweet

  As when the mighty Casey fell, demolished at our feet.

  9.

  MAROONED

  A story about a loser trying to get back in the game, inspired by my friend’s beautiful red-haired daughter, seventeen, who was sensing her peers edging ahead of her, getting good grades and cool summer jobs and hunky boyfriends, meanwhile a twerp beat her out for class president and she was horrified by a rash of pimples, so one night at supper her father tried to buck her up and tell her that life is not about racking up points, while the girl ignored him, her face in a book, as he murmured something about the virtue of self-awareness, whereupon she looked up from her book and asked, apropos of nothing at all, “Is fellatio considered a normal sexual practice?” and her poor father almost coughed up his meatballs. It was her way of declining his sympathy by firing a warning shot into the air. I was there. I was impressed.

  I remember exactly when the marriage took an odd turn. I was on the examining table with my shorts around my ankles and my tail up in the air and Dr. Miller surveying my colon through a cold steel periscope and making hmmmm sounds, his ballpoint pen scratching on a notepad, and at this delicate moment, he said, softly, “Do I strike you as a selfish person?”

  “No . . . why?” I asked. The periscope felt like it was about six feet up me and I’m only five foot eight.

  “I took a personal-inventory test in that book about getting ahead that everybody’s reading—you know, the book that I heard you’re related to the author of,” he said. According to the test, he said, he was rather selfish.

  I groaned, feeling the excavation of the Holland Tunnel within me, but of course I knew which book he meant. My dumbbell brother-in-law Dave’s book, that’s which one.

  He told me Dave’s book had meant a lot to him. “I never buy books other than science fiction,” he confided, “but my partner, Jamie, gave it to me for my birthday and I opened it up and I couldn’t put the rascal down. Heck of a book.” Meanwhile, the periscope was way up there in my hinder, probing parts of me I had been unaware of until now. “He says that what holds us back is fear, and that fear is selfish, and that getting ahead is a problem of getting outside yourself,” and he gave the periscope a little nudge for emphasis. “You have to really focus on a goal outside yourself in order to succeed. My goal is to open a restaurant. Jamie’s a wonderful cook. Chinese and Mexican, what do you think?”

  I felt sore afterward. I went home and told Julie that a person as dim as my proctologist was exactly who Dave’s book was aimed at, one ream job deserves another, and so forth. I was steamed.

  She said, “You’ve always resented my brother, Danny, and you know why? I’ll tell you why. Because your life is in Park and the key isn’t even in the ignition. You’re all about negativity, Danny. You stopped growing twenty-six years ago. And how would I know? Because I’m your wife, that’s how I know.”

  • • •

  Twenty-six years ago I graduated from the University of Minnesota journalism school with honors, the editor of the Minnesota Daily, and got a job as a professional copywriter at a Minneapolis ad agency. Dave Grebe was a clerk in his dad’s stationery store, peddling birthday cards, and he and I played basketball on a Lutheran church team; that’s how I met his sister Julie; she picked him up after the game because he’d lost his driver’s license for drunk driving. He was twenty, big, and porky and none too bright, just like now. “I’d sure like to get the heck out of stationery, I hate the smell of it, mucilage especially, and the damn perfume, it’s like someone vomited after eating fruit,” Dave remarked to me once.

  So I was not too surprised when, one fine day, Dave walked away from his job and shaved his head clean and moved to a commune in south Minneapolis, living with sixteen other disciples of the Serene Master Diego Tua, putting on the sandals of humility and the pale-green robe of constant renewal. “I have left your world, Danny,” he told me on the phone.

  Julie, who had become my wife, thought that Dave “just needed to get away for a while.” I pointed out to her that the Tuans were fanatics who roamed the airport jingling bells and droning and whanging on drums, collecting money to support their master and his many wives and concubines. The Tuans believed that they possessed the immaculate secrets of the infinite universe and everyone else was vermin.

  Julie thought they were Buddhists of some sort.

  “They could be Buddhists or nudists or used-car salesmen who like to dress up in gowns, but whatever they are, they’re working your brother like a puppet on a string.”

  She thought that Dave was only following his conscience and exploring life beyond stationery. Subject closed. So I did double duty for a few years—was a copywriter and kept the Grebe stationery store going—and Dave went around droning and whanging and announcing that he possessed the true light and making a holy nuisance of himself.

  “We are God’s roadblocks,” said the Happy Master, Diego himself, “warning the people that the bridge ahead has fallen into the river of uncaring.” His real name was Tim U. Apthed; he chose the name Diego, Die-ego, and crunched his initials into a surname, and founded a church for jerks. My agency, Curry, Cosset, Dorn, flew me to Atlanta or Boston or Chicago occasionally, and I’d come running through the Minneapolis–St. Paul terminal to catch a plane and hear the drums and bells and there were the Tuans in the middle of the concourse, holding up their signs, “YOUR LIFE IS A LIE,” and chanting, “Only two ways, one false, one true. Only one life, which way are you? Back! back! turn away from your lies! And God will give you a beautiful surprise!” and I had to squeeze through the crowd of shaven-headed men in sandals and robes, including my blissful idiot brother-in-law, and get on board the plane. It was like Run, Sheep, Run.

  “Well, when he talks about people being so materialistic, I think he has a good point,” said Julie. Who loves her kitchen, her eight-burner range, her big stainless-steel fridge with the glass door, her copper skillets, her king-size bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, et cetera, et cetera.

  Then, fifteen years ago, Mr. Grebe died of a cerebral hemorrhage—clapped his hand to his forehead one morning and said, “Oh mercy. Call Ann and tell her I’ll be late,” and fell over dead onto the mechanical pencils. The rest of us were living in the rollerball era, but Mr. Grebe never gave up on mechanical pencils, or on carbon paper, or the mimeograph, despite the advent of photocopying. The family was devastated at the loss of this vacuous and bewildered man. They mourned for weeks, during which I was the bulwark, arranging the funeral, paying the bills, ordering stock for the store, hiring part-time help, and Dave sat in a corner weeping and chanting. They never found out who Ann was.

  Dave left the Tuans and let his hair grow out and went back to work at the Wm. Grebe Stationery Shop. Every few days he’d call up and say, “I don’t know how I can ever make it up to everyone for the embarrassment I have been. I was a dope and I don’t deserve forgiveness. I ought to change my name and join the merchant marine and never come back.”

  You get tired of remorse when it becomes a broken record. Dave kept saying, “You’ve been so great, Danny, and I’ve been a big zero. I don’t know why God lets me live.” After a few months of it, I told him that I didn’t know either but that he could take his guilt and put it where the moon don’t shine. He reported this to Julie. She canceled our v
acation trip to the Bahamas out of sheer spite. “I can never forgive you for saying that to my brother,” she said, and she was right, she couldn’t.

  Meanwhile, Dave, who once had renounced material things, took over Wm. Grebe, stocked it with rollerballs and home copiers and iPads and iDoodads, and expanded into malls and branched out into discount bookselling, got rich in about three years, and became one smooth guy: bought a Hasselblad camera, Finnish furniture, a 1927 Martin guitar, four Harleys, a Peterbilt truck, an original Monet (Girl with Light Hair), and next thing I knew he was going around giving pep talks to basketball arenas full of shiny-faced men, and then, he wrote his book about getting ahead, Never Buy a Bottle of Rat Poison That Comes with Gift Coupons. It sold more copies than there are rats in New York. He turned Tuanism inside out and restated it in capitalist terms, and made low cash flow seem like a denial of God’s love.

  On the same day that an interview with Dave appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, I got canned at the ad agency. Twenty-five years I had labored at Curry, Cosset, Dorn, and on Monday morning, as I sharpened my pencils, a twenty-nine-year-old yahoo with a red bow tie leaned over the wall of my work cubicle and said, “The folks at Chippy called and cut back on the campaign, Danny. I’m going to have to let you go for a while.”

  “Are you sure?” That’s all I could think to say. A quarter-century with the company—“Are you sure?” He was sure.

  I crawled home, bleeding, and Julie was glued to the TV, watching Dave talk about the irrelevance of suffering. It was a videotape, not a live appearance, but even so, she did not turn it off when she heard my tragic news. She said, “That’s too bad,” and then, “I’m proud of him. This is so cool, it’s one of his new videotapes. He’s going to put out twelve of them. He just seems to touch a chord in people, don’t you think? People can’t help but respond to him. It’s a natural gift.” She recommended that I study Rat Poison to give me the confidence to find a new job and wait for his next book, How to Find Your Rear End Without Using Both Hands.

  “Your brother,” I said, “is one of the world’s biggest B.S.-ers.”

  This was when Julie decided that we needed to face up to my problems. “You are a dark cloud in my life, Danny. A small dark cloud,” she said.

  I don’t know what she meant by that. I’m a happy guy who loves life, it’s just that I have a moony face. A guy can’t help it that his face won’t light up. Inside, I’m like a kid with a new puppy. Though being flushed down the toilet while your brother-in-law is getting rich certainly puts a crimp in a guy’s hose. Dave was hot. I was dead. For twenty-five years, I had been a happy guy who created dancing ketchup commercials, who made high-fiber bran flakes witty, who wrote those coffee commercials in which the husband and wife share a golden moment over a cup of java. I brought lucid emotion to capitalism, and Dave brought gibberish, and he walked off with the prize.

  The next day, Julie told me that Dave thought that she and I should go away and be alone and he’d given her fifteen thousand dollars so we could charter a fifty-foot schooner for a two-week cruise off Antigua, where we could try to put the marriage back together.

  “Fifteen thousand dollars would come in handy in other ways than blowing it on a vacation,” I pointed out. “We could invest it. I’m unemployed, you know.”

  “Aren’t you willing to invest in our marriage?” she said.

  “We could buy a boat for that kind of money and sail on the Mississippi every weekend.”

  She said that fifteen thousand wasn’t enough to pay her to get into a boat with me at the tiller.

  “Remember the time we drifted powerless down the river because you put oil in the gas tank? Remember how you tried to rig up an overcoat on an oar to make a sail? Remember how we drifted toward that oncoming coal barge and stood and waved our arms and cried out in our pitiful voices?”

  Ten years had not dimmed her memory of that one bad afternoon.

  So off we flew to Antigua.

  • • •

  We flew first-class, in those wide upholstered seats, where everything is sparkly and fresh and lemony and candles flicker on the serving cart. A painful reminder of how cheery life can be for the very rich. People like my brother-in-law. The flight attendants wore gold-paisley sarongs slit up the side and pink-passion lipstick, they were Barnard graduates (cum laude) in humanities, and they set a vase of fresh roses on my table, along with the ceviche and salmon loaf and crab puffs with Mornay sauce, and they leaned over me, their perfect college-educated breasts hanging prettily in place, and they whispered, “You’ve got a nice butt. You ever read Kant?” They only flirted with me because I was holding a first-class ticket, they wouldn’t have given me the time of day back in economy class; I wanted to say, “I’m forty-seven, I’m broke, ashamed, in pain, on the verge of divorce, and sponging off a despised relative. I’ve hit bottom, babes. Go away unless you want to see a has-been burst into tears.”

  • • •

  We stayed one night at Jumby Bay, dropping a bundle of Dave’s dough, and headed off by cab to the Lucky Lovers Marina, and there, at the end of the dock, lay the Susy Q. I put my arm around Julie, who was shivering despite the bright sunshine and eighty-five degrees. She did not seem to welcome my arm so I removed it.

  “Is that a schooner or a ketch?” I said.

  “It’s a yawl,” she replied. It was hard not to notice the frayed rigging and rusted hardware, the oil slick around the stern, the sail in a big heap on deck, and what appeared to be sneaker tread marks along the side of the hull. Evidently the boat had capsized at one point and the crew had to evacuate—even worse was the fact that nobody had scrubbed the marks off. But we had put down a deposit of fifteen hundred bucks already, so we banished doubt from our minds and tried to be hopeful.

  “Hello! Anybody below?” I hollered. There was a muffled yo, and a beautiful young man poked up his head from the cockpit and smiled. His golden curls framed his Grecian godlike face, his deep tan set off by a green T-shirt that said, “Life Is a Series of Beginnings.” He was Rusty, our captain, he said. “I was just making your bed downstairs. Come on down. Your room’s up front!”

  This struck me as odd, that he said downstairs instead of belowdecks, and I mentioned this to Julie as we stowed our bags in the cabin. “How can you get upset about poor word choice when our marriage is petering out and there is so little real love between us?” she asked.

  The Susy Q cleared port and sailed west toward Sansevar Trist, and she and I sat below discussing our marriage, which I have always believed is not a good idea, certainly not for Julie and me. My experience tells me that we should shoot eight ball, sit in a hot tub, go to the zoo, rake the lawn, spread warm oil on each other’s bodies, do anything but talk about our marriage, but she is a fan of those articles like “How Lousy Is Your Marriage: A 10-Minute Quiz That Could Help You Improve It,” and of course the first question is, “Are you and your husband able to sit down and discuss your differences calmly and reasonably?” No! Of course not! Are you kidding? Who discusses these things without raising their voice and becoming very emphatic? Name one person! So she launched into a reasonable discussion of differences and how she needs engagement and I am basically a narcissist, and two minutes later we’re hissing and slamming our fists on the table and striding to the other end of the room and saying things like “I can’t believe this!” and “Where do you get this hogwash?” We simply are unable to discuss our marriage—does that make us terrible people? Our marriage is like the Electoral College: it works okay if you don’t think about it.

  “Truth time. Do you love me?” Julie asked as the boat rocked in the swell, Rusty thumping around on deck overhead, dragging something.

  “How do you mean that?”

  “I mean, is it worth it to try to stay together? Marriages have their rough passages. It’s only worth it if there’s love. If there isn’t, why waste time trying to p
atch this up.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I asked first.”

  “How come I’m the one who has to say if I love you or not? Why is it always up to me?”

  There was a loud crash above, like a tree falling, and Rusty let out a cry, “Oh shoot!” I poked my head up out of the hatch. “It’s the steering thing,” he said. The tiller had broken off and was now bobbing in our wake. I told him to lash an oar in its place and come around and retrieve the tiller, and I ducked back down into the cabin. Julie was sitting on the bunk, her back to the bulkhead, her trim brown legs drawn up.

  “I better go up and help Rusty,” I said.

  “You can’t run away, Danny,” she said. “It’s a simple question. Do you love me or not? What’s so complicated about that?”

  I flopped down on the bed. “Why can’t we converse about this in a calm friendly way instead of beating ourselves up over every little thing—”

  “A little thing,” she said. “Our love. A little thing. Oh right. Sure. Great way to start off a vacation. Our love, a little thing.”

  There was a loud cra-a-a-ack above and a muffled splash. I stuck my head up. The sail was gone, and the mast. “I was gonna turn right and the whole thing broke and fell off,” he said, shaking his head. “Boy, I never saw anything like that! Whole sail just fell off!” He shrugged and grinned, like he’d just burned the toast. “Oh well, we still got a motor.” I told him to come about and retrieve the sail and mast and then head for port.

  I told Julie that we had serious problems above and maybe we should postpone our talk. She said we had been postponing it for twenty years.

  I was about to tell her how full of balloon juice she was, and then I heard the motor turn over, a dry raspy sound, like gravel going down a chute, and I got the impression that Rusty had neglected to gas up and that the Susy Q was not going anywhere. Still, it wasn’t as aggravating as Miss Priss there, sitting and telling me about my marriage.